MSU, Detroit agree on farm research plan

The City of Detroit and Michigan State University have agreed in principle to pursue a major urban agriculture research program within the city to explore innovative research and techniques, such as transforming empty buildings into multi-tiered farms.

The program is envisioned as the central hub of a future collection of worldwide facilities focused on urban agriculture research.

No central site has been chosen yet, and the memorandum of understanding that was signed Wednesday by Mayor Dave Bing and MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon doesn't tie either side to any specific deadlines or dollar commitments.

But MSU has agreed to spend $500,000 a year for three years to explore the creation of what would be called the MetroFoodPlus Innovation Cluster @Detroit. Karla Henderson, Mayor Dave Bing's executive for planning and facilities, said the agreement has two goals: to spark innovation in food, energy and water systems development to help feed and sustain the world's urban residents, and to use some of Detroit's vast inventory of vacant and abandoned land and buildings for new economic development.

If built, the multimillion-dollar research center could occupy 8 to 10 acres and employ a range of specialists working on research and teaching students and others. The memorandum of understanding notes explicitly that the jobs at the center would not be low-wage farm work.

The agreement envisions using Detroit's "current vacant land, brownfields, and deteriorating physical structures as the basis for future growth and development."

"Detroit, with the assistance of MSU and many others, has the opportunity to redefine metropolitan food and agriculture for the 21st Century," Bing said in a written statement. "We want to demonstrate that innovation based on metropolitan food production can create new businesses and jobs, return idle land to productivity and grow a more environmentally sustainable and economically vital city."

Rick Foster, co-director of the Innovation Cluster, has been working with the city for the past few months on the concept. He told the Free Press earlier that the campus would be the central facility in a worldwide research effort to overcome urban food shortages in a world growing increasingly crowded, hot, and short of water and energy.

The agreement says that MSU and the city would approach businesses and nonprofits as well as government sources for funds to pay for the center. The final cost was not estimated but clearly would run into the many millions of dollars,

As the Free Press reported earlier, the MSU proposal has sparked some concerns among Detroit's flourishing community gardening movement that the campus would bring a corporate influence to Detroit's urban farming movement. To combat such a notion, Henderson said the city and MSU have scheduled community meetings for July 11 and 12 to gather community response and advice.

The list of invitees for those meetings includes Ashley Atkinson of the Greening of Detroit, Dan Carmody, president of Eastern Market; Malik Yakini, head of the Detroit Food Policy Council; Gary Wozniak, head of the proposed nonprofit RecoveryPark urban farm project, and Mike Score, president of the proposed for-profit Hantz Farms urban farming project.

The agreement is significant because it shows that the Bing administration is ready to embrace, after perhaps three years of public debate, the notion that urban agriculture in some form could provide one solution to the problem of vacant land and buildings in Detroit.

However, skepticism still exists among the public and at City Council about how fully to embrace large-scale farming in the city.